very first person

Highway to Heaven

Every Time Deanne Stillman Drives PCH, She Remembers Why She Lives in California--That Maybe We Really Are in Paradise

August 09, 1998|DEANNE STILLMAN | Deanne Stillman is currently writing a book, "The Murders at Twentynine Palms," for Avon. Her last article for the magazine was a profile of Gloria Allred

The invitation was to a party on the Santa Monica Pier in honor of Route 66. When the day came, I wanted to go. Every year the party was a good one, and I knew that this one, like the others, would properly revere America's holiest of highways. One of my favorite bands, the Insect Surfers, was playing. I could visit a 1962 Thunderbird convertible, my favorite car. And, of course, what's a pier party without food on a stick? But I broke with tradition and headed north, past the party. I confess, I had another date. It was a date with my other lover, the one that takes over where Route 66 runs out of steam. I refer to the Pacific Coast Highway. I telepathically sent my regrets and headed down the California Incline, which, as inclines go, is surely as good as they get.

It was not easy to make this choice. Like many Americans, I have not only gotten a few kicks on Route 66, but also have had a lifelong attachment to it. John Steinbeck understood this relationship well. In "Grapes of Wrath," he wrote, "Sixty-six is the path of the people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from a thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership. . . . They come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. Sixty-six is the mother road, the road of flight."

I knew I was going home when I took my first road trip west across Route 66 in college. At the time, my actual address was on Fifth Avenue in New York City. At first, I felt a little thrill when I wrote the return address on letters back to my point of origin in Ohio. But after a while, the reality of that particular thoroughfare fueled only my surface dreams. Like Calamity Jane, Johnny Carson, the Doors and a host of others who populated my fantasies, I belonged on the far side of the Rockies, and Route 66 carried me there. For the last 13 years I have lived at its end. And there the love affair has come to completion. Although I do not officially make my home on the Pacific Coast Highway, it is where I can be found whenever I feel the need to drive. Remember Maria, the tragic Joan Didion heroine of "Play It As It Lays"? She took to the freeways to forget why she was here, and later, after the narcosis of driving had set in, "she slept and did not dream." I guess that makes me the anti-Maria. Because sometimes I forget why I came here, and when that happens, I take advantage of the national birthright and hit the road, to imagine myself all over again, to remember.

The 45-degree grade (at least that's what it feels like) of the California Incline is a quick tease of things to come. An easy glide below the rocky palisades of Santa Monica, a pedal-to-the-metal merge with traffic, a lane change like an eel, and I'm part of a sea-level airstream that breathes life into the land's end that Route 66 filled up and abandoned.

PCH loves me like Route 66 never could. It provides escape from what was supposed to have been the last flight. And it does so in the most generous of ways. On one side, it protects me: The mountains are a barrier against the world to the east, the world of obligations, rules and Wolf Blitzer, the world that makes me forget why I live in California. "Don't worry, baby," it says, "they can't get here from there." But just to hedge its bets, PCH offers Plan B: complete freedom. It's not threatened if I stop for a drink of water, take to the sea--that's why it's built right next to it. "If you're happy, I'm happy," it says. "I would never want you to feel trapped. After all, this is California. Pull over. Ride a wave. Read a book. I'm not going anywhere. Well, actually, I'm going up and down the coast, and back again. But, basically, I'll be right here."

I'm in the far left lane and starting to breathe easy now, slower. I can see the horizon, but just barely. I'm not really out of the woods until I pass Gladstone's and the imprisoned crustaceans--not my idea of the Holy Land. So long, frat-house drink specials, I think as the eatery fades into the past and out of my rearview mirror, and that's when I really start to feel good. I'm slipping into lightness now, and the exhilarating wrinkle of American time-space where creation myths are formed. Elvis cruised this very path, or so the storytellers have said, on his way to the Self-Realization Fellowship (and, boy, did he realize himself!). James Dean cruised it on his way to immortality. Marilyn cruised it on her way to trysts that may or may not have happened with one or both of the Kennedy brothers at Peter Lawford's Santa Monica pad . . . would these icons have lived forever had the Pacific Coast Highway not run through their lives, not carried them away from and back to themselves?